This was a remnant, rewritten and brought into the open.
I’m not sure it was a good idea, but I guess, as with many things, it’s a little too late to change that now.
Works of Art (964 words)
The first punters are coming in now. I won’t allow myself to look yet. I smell canapés and perfume, wine and chemicals.
They shriek greetings, but when they look at the walls, they are restrained, quiet, cool. Still, I smell their greed in the air. The first photographs are only the appetiser, after all. The main dish will be meat, rare and bloody, and only one, of all of them, will be able to taste it.
I know all their names. They have to give them beforehand. Alicia, my publicist, loves this. Exclusivity is such a draw.
Adolescent voices wind through the galleries; the gritty windblown shouts of the playground, the echoing babble of the changing room. There are no actual words; those are for the audience to supply from the hidden attics of their own memories.
Attics, of course, are where madwomen are traditionally kept.
Alicia has the talk, she can roll it out like wallpaper. Transgressive Art, the Aesthetic of Excess, everything the critics purr over. She drops it when we’re alone; a weird form of trust. I don’t think she does it with any of her other clients.. “Darling, you know what I think,” she says. “Self-indulgent crap, the lot of it. You’re all bloody mad. But you sell yourselves like nothing on earth; I love it. And you, you’re the most.” Sometimes, after the third glass, she leans in, fixes those conker-brown eyes on me like laser gunsights. “Except the bullshit doesn’t mean a thing to you either, does it? Tell me, sweetie, what are you really after?”
She tilts her head, with a sort of cynical hope. I just smile. I’ve never answered yet.
She doesn’t have to care what I really want, so long as I bring the punters in. Even for me it’s getting harder, though. Art meant to outrage has been around for so long, so many envelopes have been pushed, torn, shredded, and binned. And as Anthony Julius pointed out, you have to try pretty hard to be more shocking than what’s been done by real people, for real reasons.
But enough still come; hoping for that extreme experience. Hoping to be lucky. Hoping to be chosen to see the final part of the installation. And if they don’t manage that, well, at least their pictures will be in the glossies.
In the first room, among the mirrors, the photographs are crammed, half hidden. Some are blown up to blurring, others are clear, but fragmented. Sections of skin. Near the entrance, most of the skin is marred only by the faint chalkpits of adolescent acne.
As the audience move deeper, the pictures clarify. The white line left by a nail-file. The pallid ridge, punctuated either side by stitches, of a deeper slash made by a serrated kitchen knife. That picture has a bluish wash, the colour of ambulance lights.
In the next gallery, parts of the body. Arms like railway junctions, tracked with ridged lines, running into each other. A breast, half the nipple excised.
The first murmurs of discomfort. If I were doing this for art, it would be my moment of triumph.
Come in little fishies. Little sharks.
The computer beeps. One of my special guests has signed in. Tonight, I have something in my net.
I look up at the monitor.
Francesca Lampeter.
It always surprises me, how much, how little, they change. She was glossy, streamlined as a thoroughbred. Now she’s plumped up, but it looks artificial, like a fat suit. Her hair is still expensively styled; she went to Vidal Sassoon, back then, at fourteen - and anyone who didn’t…well. But it’s thinner. Definitely thinner.
The man she’s with is much younger. Son? Toyboy? Gay arm candy?
It doesn’t matter. He won’t be allowed in. She will.
I don’t bother watching the rest. The monitor doesn’t beep again.
I’ve never had two in one evening. That would be interesting. Thinking back, there are only a handful left, now.
I taste iron, in the back of my throat; I manoeuvre the chair into position. It’s too soon; even if she barely looks at anything, it will take her at least twenty minutes to get through the last gallery.
I wait. It’s something I’ve perfected. Pain hums along my nerves like wind in telephone wires.
Alicia will be coming up to her now, informing her that she’s in luck. She’ll look surprised, delighted, maybe a little apprehensive. She might shriek, clap her hands, hug the toyboy. The rest will moan, sulk, pretend it doesn’t matter.
The Francesca I remember would just toss that head of glossy, perfectly cut hair; knowing that of course she’d been chosen. Because she was one of the special ones. Because she was entitled.
I wonder whether this Francesca tosses that thinning mop with the same assurance.
The doors open with the exact sound of the girls’ changing rooms, all that time ago. The echoes of laughter, the orange-painted walls; everything is the same.
Except me.
She looks at me, where I sit, naked. Her face jerks with a reflex of disgust I recognise: she used to look at me in a very similar way. But back then, I deserved it less: I was just a girl. Plump, a little spotty, with the wrong clothes, the wrong voice, the wrong interests.
Now, I’m a work of art.
She’s looking around, her eyes beginning to widen with something: recognition, panic. Nausea.
“Francesca,” I say. I always left my lips, my tongue alone, knowing one day I would be able to speak.
I reach out with the remains of my right hand. “So nice, to meet one of my collaborators.”
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